Linux Graphics News - August 2013

X.org

The X.org project is working towards the next major release, with
August seeing mostly minor releases of various X components. Most
notably of these were the mesa 9.2 release, new -intel and -ati driver
releases, and a second pre-release of a new stable Xserver.

The two -intel driver releases includes some Haswell performance
tuning, RGB overlay support for Ironlake and later, and various other
fixes. Most changes were to the SNA code path.

The -ati release is significant, as this is the first release in
some time. This adds PCI IDs and support for a huge range of
newer ATI hardware (Sea Islands, Southern Islands, Richland, and Kabini
APU), reverse prime support, 2d tiling support and glamor 2d
acceleration for radeonsi, and various fixes and enhancements.

The Mesa 9.2.0
release was announced Aug 27th as a development release. This will
be followed by a 9.2.1 stable release in the coming weeks. The main new
feature in mesa 9.2 is the OpenGL 3.1 API, which is partially
implemented by several drivers.

Following these releases, Mesa development has focused on glsl,
clover, geometry shader support for gen7 Intel, radeonsi cleanup,
gallivm fixes, and other assorted code base cleanup.

Beyond Mesa and video drivers, the core X.org development these days
is mostly maintenance, refactoring, and cleanup work. Adam Jackson put
attention to cleaning up rootless code, various janitorial cleanups, and
piglit test fixes. Eric Anholt put attention into Xephyr, migrating
code to XCB and removing dead or obsolete code. Last month we looked at
the ongoing new DRI3 work.

Wayland

The Wayland project comprises two code trees: 'wayland', which is
just the protocol definition, and 'weston', the demo compositor that
implements the backend server for the protocol.

Weston 1.2.1 was released on August 22nd this month, followed by
1.2.2 a week later to fix four serious regressions. Wayland 1.2.1 was
released on August 22nd as well and is the current stable release; it
provides cherry-picks of fixes since 1.2.0, documentation improvements,
and addition of touch support to the move API.

Wayland Development

Alexander E. Patrakov proposed a patch series to improve clickpad
behavior in the compositor for Sony VAIO and similar laptops, to make
it behave more similarly to Windows. This was all generally well
received. It was suggested to add such logic via a separate library,
e.g. libtouchpad, as otherwise this will result in duplication in
other shells; David Herrmann hopes to establish this repository in
September. This also opened wider discussion about gesture support in
the protocol, whether it's appropriate to do client-side, in the
compositor, or elsewhere; sounds like there's still many open
input-architecture questions here.

Rob Bradford added a --with-cairo option to permit finer
control of what Cairo backend should be expected and used, and
deliberately error out if it wasn't found. With this change, Cairo
now builds its demo clients using cairo's 'image' backend. To
continue using cairo-gl, you must explicitly pass --with-cairo=gl to
weston during configuration. Armin K added a config summary display,
to report what actually got configured.

Rob Bradford posted an update of his multi-input resource
support patch, which enables weston to handle cases where multiple
sets of input devices of the same class are attached. Along with this
he also updated a patch to allow input destroy requests.

Stefan Schmidt proposed a protocol change to add some
specific sensors as inputs (e.g. for games): Compass, gyroscope, and
accelerometer.

Rusty Lynch added touch support to the wl_shell_surface_move
API call, to permit touch based dragging. Some follow-on work was
identified for detecting if different gestures are to be activated
(e.g. second finger for resizing). This change was also picked for
the 1.2.1 release.

Jason Ekstrand resurrected a concept for a system compositor protocol.
This would provide an interface for compositors who display other
compositors or stand-alone full-screen interfaces. This could serve
as an abstraction layer, a way to display simple full screen clients,
or as a DRM/KMS backend for other compositors.

Cairo

Cairo release 1.12.16 was announced August 26. This the first stable
release since February, and provides a swath of fixes for crashes,
leaks, double-frees, etc. Particular areas of attention have been the
gl backend, freetype support, and the test suite.

The 2.0.1 release is a bug-fix-only release comprising several dozen
changes to fix crashes, buffer overflows, and various other checks in
jpeg2000, matroskaenc, avisynth, qdm2, mjpegdec, and other places.

The following features are committed to the master trunk, and will
become available in the next major release:

aecho filter

perspective filter ported from libmpcodecs

ffprobe -show_programs option

compand filter

RTMP seek support

when transcoding with ffmpeg (i.e. not streamcopying), -ss is now accurate
even when used as an input option. Previous behavior can be restored with
the -noaccurate_seek option.

ffmpeg -t option can now be used for inputs, to limit the duration of
data read from an input file

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